On Friday 7th March technology company ARM hosted a hackathon, sponsored by the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) IoT Ecosystem Demonstrator competition. The IoT research branch of ARM along with 1248.io and others collaborate in the @OpenIoTProject in the exploration of connected IoT systems. Part of this exploration was the hackathon, where various data feeds from a diverse set of sensors on the ARM premises have been made available to the public along with a call for any project (artwork, visualisation, analysis, web integration etc.) that people would come up with.

I’ve had a look at the starter pack (highly recommended read). I didn’t think I would stand a chance in the competition against ARM employees whose day job it is to come up with great IoT data analysis strategies, but I was keen to acquire some more technical IoT skills, namely:

  • browsing of HyperCat catalogues (these are hierarchical directories of ‘things’  whose feeds are made available by organisations)
  • improve my JavaScript and do some real-time analysis in NodeRED
  • use the GoogleMap API to create an IoT mash-up.

To make a long story short, my attempts to use MQTT in NodeRED to retrieve data from 1248.io’s Geras database (a data store for IoT data) where fruitless – nobody managed to receive data from that feed. Instead, I resorted to some manual HyperCat exploration and created a NodeRED flow to save data from one particular type of sensor (street lamps!!!) into my own Geras instance. The result of my experiment is summarised in a 20min movie/screen cast to be seen in 1248.io’s Google page